Gaza: What Could the Press Corps Have Done Differently?

Its’ too early to tell if Operation Protective Edge is really winding down or not. Israel says it has destroyed all the terror tunnels it knows of, but the possibility of continued rocket fire looms over the Cairo truce talks.

After one month of conflict, it’s fair to ask, What could the news services in Gaza have done differently?

Lee Habeeb of the National Review was on CNN discussing media coverage of the Gaza conflict. Following up on his recent column, Hamas’s Co-Conspirators, Habeeb raised several important points faulting the press corps for not showing Hamas fighters or adequately explaining the casualty count.

The interviewer, Kate Bolduan, wasn’t representing the mainstream media, but she was prepared ahead of time to defend CNN’s work.

Asked what reporters could be doing better, I think Habeeb could have answered better.

Although the IDF has since withdrawn from Gaza, the question isn’t academic. Soldiers remain massed along the border, poised to re-enter Gaza if necessary. And if the ceasefire takes hold into something long-term, journalists will have greater access to get a clearer picture of the casualty count.

So what do I think reporters should be doing better? I’ll sum it up in a 12-letter word.

Transparency.

Transparency demands that reporters be frank with their audiences about the circumstances they work under, and the methodology they use to gather and verify information.

I haven’t seen statements such as, “These casualty figures are based on Gaza health officials who are employed by Hamas.”

I haven’t seen any reporters point out that Hamas hasn’t released the names of any of its fallen combatants, nor have I seen coverage of the Gaza funerals reflecting that the dead person may have been a combatant. Do journalists only go to the funerals of children?

I haven’t seen qualified casualty figures. I have seen lines stating “X number of Palestinians have been killed,” followed by, in the reporter’s own voice, “the vast majority of whom are civilians.” What’s the basis for that certainty?

I haven’t seen reporters acknowledge that the ordinary Palestinians don’t necessarily speak freely. Which would explain why I haven’t seen displaced Gazans admitting their building was blown up because of the terror commander across the hall, the sniper’s nest upstairs, a stash of rockets in the basement, some tunnel running beneath the building, or the utter incompetence of a misfired Palestinian rocket.

And I haven’t seen editors acknowledge their reliance on Palestinian stringers — writers, cameramen, and technicians — who aren’t free to ask tough questions. If you’re a foreign correspondent, the worst case scenario — Alan Johnson and Paul Martin notwithstanding — is getting kicked out of Gaza. But if you’re a Palestinian journalist, the worst case scenario is when Hamas’s thugs knock on your door, interested in a not-so-friendly chat about something you reported.

For the India’s NDTV, transparency is telling readers that reporter Sreenivasan Jain and his crew left Gaza before posting an extraordinary video of Hamas goons preparing a rocket right outside a hotel where many reporters were staying.

This report is being aired on NDTV and published on ndtv.com after our team left the Gaza strip – Hamas has not taken very kindly to any reporting of its rockets being fired. But just as we reported the devastating consequences of Israel’s offensive on Gaza’s civilians, it is equally important to report on how Hamas places those very civilians at risk by firing rockets deep from the heart of civilian zones.

I do appreciate the Washington Post for taking a stab at this issue. Among the points raised by media issues reporter Paul Farhi:

Humanitarian aid groups say they are making a good faith effort to tally casualties in difficult circumstances.

Israel wasn’t providing its own stats.

Gaza Health Minister Ashraf Kidra, of Hamas, is “the only game in town.”

Another example of transparency not specifically addressed by Habeeb or Farhi came from a different reporter — also from the Washington Post. Sudarsan Raghavan is in Gaza, and this dispatch draws attention to repeated scenes of staged photographs, which is one example of fauxtography.

The scene was too neat.

I had just arrived outside the shattered remains of a large mosque in central Gaza City last week. It had been pulverized by an Israeli airstrike. There was rubble, glass and metal everywhere. But on a patch of ground in front of the structure, visible for everyone to see, was a small, dusty carpet.

On top lay piles of burned, ripped copies of the Koran, Islam’s holy book. The symbolism was obvious, almost too perfect. It was clear that someone had placed them there to attract sympathy for the Palestinian cause. A television crew spotted the pile and filmed it. Mission accomplished.

another method of counteracting the influence of radical islam: while much of the activity has focused on the israel/gaza conflict, there are almost daily reports of islamist crimes against humanity in different parts of the world. just today, for example, the new york times published the following article:

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such articles should be pasted onto facebook, twitter, and all sites with a large readership. the eyes of the world have to be opened to the global threat posed by hamas and its companion organizations. it’s not only israel and jews who are in the cross-hairs of islamist guns.

Here goes a good one!!!! HAMAS DECLARES THEY WON THE WAR AGAINST ISRAEL!!!!!……Wow, if they won just imagine if they lost!!……but there is a good side to this news; If Israel lost, then the media should be good to us because the looser always is the weak and deserves sympathy so maybe we will be the “poor Israelies and they will be the bad mighty palestinians!!” LOL.

Get CNN ABC {or other alphabet network to go in}.If one gets wounded or killed ,then perhaps genuine story will be sought.I saw the UN 12 hours ago and the people were yawning at both the Israeli and arab rehetoric.Lebanese ambasodor was acting like the old Soviet style Pravda reporting knowing their LIFE depended on it {Hezbollah runs Lebanon} What can be done?? I Hate the UN & have wanted it out of the US for 40 years since childhood.It is worse then useless.There are my 20 cents. Oh yeah , seems like there wre seven “cease fires” SO predictable.Cost IDF momentum and lies and makes the PM look foolish to the murderous muslims.

WAIT A MINUTE!!!!……..aren’t we the “owners of all the media of the world?”…….and we do that because we own all the banks and we control the world?….then.can someone explain to me how come the vast majority of the media publish all this ugly things about us?….we will have to fire a lot of our employees!!!!

People may indeed wonder, but the media don’t much care, especially the media that dines off the public purse. Fact is that nothing except ratings gets their attention, and calls to hold them to account are treated by senior management as minor irritants. The top people at those media outlets have massive egos that respond only to loss of budget or embarrassment.

On that interview with Lee Habeeb, Kate Bolduan repeatedly used the defence of “we gave you as much time as the other side, so how can we be biased?”. That’s how CNN (and no doubt many other media outlets) see this. They don’t really care about getting to the truth, they only care about how much air time they give each “side”. As Kate Bolduan showed us, the airtime scorecard is what they use to cover their butts.

The “both sides” doctrine has produced live interviews with terrorist leaders: Osama Hamdan, Sami Abu Zuhri, and even Khaled Mashaal himself. Funny, but I don’t recall CNN giving interviews to Al-Qaeda. Somehow, CNN must have calculated that Americans would abandon them in droves if they did that. But evidently, it sees nothing wrong with Hamas, a terrorist group whose mission is the obliteration of Israel and the killing of all Jews worldwide, and is happy to allow its chief and arguably its wealthiest and most warmongering member a platform to propound lies virtually unchallenged.

Essentially, CNN is laundering Hamas and making it palatable for American viewers. The yardstick is fairly simple: CNN has never quoted a single sentence from the Hamas charter, and never made it clear to its viewers that the core of Hamas’s ideology is the same as that of Mein Kampf: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which the Hamas charter quotes directly.

But will they do it? My call to CNN et. al. is “don’t tell us, show us” — show us that you can actually do the job you claim to know: journalism. When a crew from a small TV station in New Delhi can whip CNN’s ass just by resourcefulness and perseverance, it’s up to every CNN reporter and anchor to do better, starting with being more honest.

I viewed the CNN interview of Lee Habeeb and read his piece in the National Review. Pretty Kate Bolduan just didn’t get it. She sat there hammering away and defending CNN and yet not one reporter ever took one lying Hamas representative to task. Wol Blitzer looked like a deer in the headlights. Never challenging anyobe, except for Israeli representatives

I like the concept of transparency but think completeness is a better answer. By completeness I mean a representative model that allows the reader to understand what is really happening and be able to understand what might happen next.

Like referees at a game, or governments, the less you are aware of them the better they are doing their jobs. Present journalists follow advocacy models where they present one view of a story and push it as the only view, or as the truth. If their model substantially represented reality then it might still be quality, but it rarely does. I work with a diverse group of people. Both liberals and conservatives who read or listened to “the news” said they couldn’t understand what was going on or why things were happening.

What’s worse is the corruption of vocabulary. By claiming to want peace or claiming to be liberal while suborning the killing or innocents and the destruction of Israel and collateral genocide people become unsure what peace, war and liberalism mean. It reduces their ability to discern meaning and make quality decisions. This has been going on for so long I suspect that is the underlying agenda of the media and academe.

I fully agree, the media and especially CNN once again have done a very poor job. For example; when someone got killed or injured how often do they get killed or injured? I believe that everyone will agree that the answer is ONE TIME and only one time. But when I watch CNN reporting in a frame of 5 minutes the same person got killed 4 times and the same child injured 9 times. Showing it over and over again is not reporting news it is looking to condemn a nation that is trying to defends itself. Furthermore not once did CNN show a Hamas fighter that got killed they all fall into the INNOCENT VICTIMS reporting and when CNN reported and still stresses it today as to how many innocent children, women and men are you telling us that all were INNOCENT? That there was not even one Hamas fighter between them? You made a very big deal about the last school but not once did you mentioned that NO ONE THAT WAS INSIDE THE SCHOOL was not even injured! Only the ones that where outside on the street and how many of those were Hamas that launched the rocket? And what about the Field Hospital that Israel put up and Hamas blocked Palestinians to go to it and what about all the trucks with relieve supplies that Israel allowed to go through? In short I agree the reporting is far from the reality and the real truth. I do however admit that this time around CNN was about 15% better in reporting the truth than in past Israel conflicts. Remember Israel uses the money to reinforce their defense and Hamas uses the money to better themselves and build ways to eliminate Israel as after all this is their ultimate goal.

There is one element that prevents media to be transparent; it is not censorship by hamas, it is not fear of hamas retaliation…….IT IS ANTISEMITISM!!!!!…………..Only a few cases deserve to be mentioned as honest and transparent like the Italian guy who had to get out of Gaza to report that he witnesed how hamas rockerts hit a UN school and how hamas removed evidence of the area and blamed Israel bringing in the world media to take ppictures of children and women……..shame on most of the world media.

honest reporting, to expect the kind of transparency you discuss is a bit naive, given hamas’s stated purpose in attacking israel, whether by rockets or media manipulation; that purpose is to eliminate the “occupied territory” of israel itself. towards that end, there’s no way that islamist organizations such as hamas would allow reporting of real facts, and they would contest those facts by any and all means, including manipulated photographs. the only counter-weapon that makes sense to me is for legitimate media organizations not to send reporters and photographers into gaza at all unless given guarantees of safety and the ability to report events factually. [and we know how likely that would be!] this would leave hamas in a bit of a quandary about how to spread its misinformation around the world for the purpose of gaining support for its goal. and western media would have to be “transparent” in stating its reason for not reporting on events in gaza, including “events” that hamas itself might send to the media to counter the absence of western reporters. of course then we would have to deal with the anti-israel influences on the western press outside of hamas, but that’s a separate issue.

Hamas has a good job with the media. Every minute CNN was giving them space, showing pictures wich were repeated every while. Israel Ambassador to Washington did a tremendous job CNN’s commentator made a show crying in tears because of the deaths of Palestine’s children. I think Israel should made PR. and take those media that defame Israel to the Courts. Besides every single Jew should write to media protesting the bias against Israel.

The BBC is always the worst offender. My daughter worked in BBC news for 20 years and says it was riddled with anti-Israeli feeling among both the non-Muslim staff and the Muslim staff of whom there are many. For instance, the BBC has had to move its Middle East headquarters to Jerusalem because it is the only safe place in the Middle East but they never admit it and the backdrop to reporters reporting from Jerusalem are some bland houses, not, heaven forbid, the Old City or even Givat Ram, the Hebrew University Campus. The main correspondents, Jeremy Bowen and Lise Doucet, are extrenely anti-Israel as can be seen from their reports.

writing to every newspaper in our own countries and telling them what we think (politely) is the only way. I am at this very moment addressing the hypocrisy of the British media; writing to The Times to tell them this. This article is very helpful. Each one of us has a responsibility to stand up for Israel.